What comes to mind when you bite into a Lay's® potato chip? Do you think: Mmmm, crunchycrispysaltyfatty junkfood goodness -- I wonder how many calories are in these? I really should put this bag down now.
Or do you think: Wow, just three ingredients! And the potatoes were grown by a fourth-generation family farmer near me.
Frito-Lay, the $13 billion business unit of PepsiCo, is spending millions to try and drive home the latter message, and I haven't the faintest clue why.
A few days ago, the corporation announced in a press release that it was "Bringing the Simple Happiness of Farm Life to Big Cities Across America" with a mobile greenhouse exhibit:
Visitors to the "Lay's Mobile Farm," a 70-foot long, 10-foot wide and 14-foot high traveling greenhouse will have an opportunity to interact first-hand with plants, meet a Lay's potato farmer and enjoy interactive stations. Families will also receive take-home educational materials that provide simple tips and fun activities to inspire at-home gardening.
To help get more gardens growing, the Lay's brand will give away approximately 8,000 individual basil plants to people who participate in the farm experience. And, at the culmination of each city stop, the brand will donate all contents of the greenhouse to local community gardens, resulting in the planting of hundreds of vegetables and fruits in these urban areas.
I don't know about you, but I can definitely use some more simple happiness in my busy urban existence.
Now, Lay's must be getting its money worth from the four PR/advertising firms it's hired to drive this and last year's campaign, which connected the potatoes in the chips to seven American farmers whose families have grown for the company since 1974. Although Grist's Tom Philpott wrote last year that "Ultimately, I suspect such promotions will fade away ... Marketing schemes that fail to fool quickly skulk into obscurity," these localwashing campaigns must be getting some traction, or else Frito-Lay wouldn't keep pumping big bucks into them.
They're hitting all the right notes to get the food movement singing along: supporting local farmers, eating foods made from recognizable ingredients (Michael Pollan's grandmother would certainly recognize a potato chip), promoting "know your farmer" through a "chip tracker" feature, and now, encouraging people to grow some of their own food by giving away basil plants and supporting community gardens.
